The University of Chicago no longer is in danger of losing ancient Iranian artifacts following Wednesday's United States Supreme Court decision in the case of Jenny Rubin, et al. v. Islamic Republic of Iran.The university's Oriental Institute (OI) holds the "Persepolis Collection," which consists of approximately 30,000 archaeological artifacts on loan from the National Museum of Iran since 1937...

WASHINGTON - The US Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that Americans injured in a 1997 suicide bombing in Jerusalem cannot seize ancient Persian artifacts from a Chicago museum to satisfy a $71.5 million court judgment against Iran, which they had accused of complicity in the attack.
The justices, in an 8-0 ruling, upheld a lower court decision in favor of Iran that had prevented the plaintiffs from collecting on the judgment, which Tehran has not paid, by obtaining antiquities held at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. The important Persian cultural artifacts, on loan to the museum since the 1930s, include clay tablets boasting some of the oldest writing in the world.
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Justice Elena Kagan did not participate in the decision.
The decision could make it harder for plaintiffs in other cases arising from militant attacks overseas to seek compensation by seizing and selling off cultural relics owned by foreign countries.
The case required the Supreme Court to determine what types of assets are immune from seizure under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. That 1976 federal law largely shields foreign governments from liability in American courts, except for countries like Iran that have been designated by the US government as state sponsors of terrorism.
Iran is one of several countries and organizations ordered by US courts to pay damages in similar cases, though such orders have been difficult to enforce.

Can
American victims of terrorism seize and sell ancient Persian
antiquities located at the University of Chicago to satisfy a court
judgment against Iran? That's the question the United States Supreme
Court considered on Monday in the case of Rubin v. Islamic Republic of Iran, a case examining the mechanics of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA).

Foreign
countries generally are immune from lawsuits filed in American courts.
But the FSIA outlines exceptions to this rule, including a terrorism
exception codified at 28 U.S. Code § 1605A. Congress penned this section in 2008 to allow plaintiffs to sue designated state sponsors of terror that caused injury, harm, or death.

To satisfy a civil
judgment won in a 1605A terrorism case, a victorious plaintiff would seek out the foreign nation's assets under § 1610(g)(2), which allows the plaintiff to take control of “[a]ny property
of a foreignstate, or agency or instrumentality of a
foreign state….”

But are the assets that can be attached to execute the court judgment limited to those that are "used for a commercial
activity" as specified by § 1610(a)?
Or can the assets be any kind whatsoever, including antiquities housed
at a museum? That was the topic of oral argument in the Rubin case. Rubin pits American victims of a Jerusalem suicide bombing against the country of Iran, a country designated by the US government as a state-sponsor of terror. Hamas claimed responsibility for the Iranian sponsored attack in 1997, and a federal district court in
Washington, DC in 2003 awarded the plaintiffs $71.5 million in a default judgment,
holding Iran culpable. Read about the lengthy and complex case history here.

Since then, the plaintiffs/petitioners
have tried to secure their award through the attachment process by
taking control of ancient Iranian artifacts located in a variety of American cultural institutions, including the Persepolis and Chogha Mish antiquities collections, excavated during the 1930's and 1960's and housed in the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute through a long-term academic loan...

These days, the Supreme Court is known as a “hot bench”: Lawyers
who argue there usually have to respond to a barrage of questions from
all sides. That fast and furious questioning can make it hard for
advocates to advance their arguments, but it also makes it easier for
both the attorneys and spectators to figure out what the justices care
about, and how they might rule. The flip side of this is that when the
justices are quieter, the advocates have more time to talk, but it’s
harder to know what the justices are thinking.

The latter scenario was on display this morning at the Supreme Court, when the justices heard oral argument in Rubin v. Islamic Republic of Iran.
The case is the latest chapter in efforts by American victims of a
series of suicide bombings in Jerusalem in 1997 to recover a $71.5
million default judgment from the Islamic Republic of Iran for its role
in providing support to Hamas, the terrorist group that claimed
responsibility for the blast. After approximately 45 minutes of oral
argument, the justices seemed likely to rule against the victims, but
their relative silence made it difficult to know for sure...

The
University’s Oriental Institute (OI) is involved in an ongoing Supreme
Court case in which American terrorist victims are seeking compensation
from the Iranian government through seizing Iranian artifacts from the
OI and the Field Museum.

In September 1997, three suicide bombers
associated with the Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas, carried out an
attack on a shopping mall in Jerusalem. Among those affected were eight
United States citizens, who later filed a civil action case in a U.S.
court against the government of Iran and its involvement in providing
financial support to the bombers.

By Pete WilliamsJUN 27 2017, 11:30 AM ET
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to take up a long running legal
battle over a claim by victims of terrorism to Iranian antiquities held
in a Chicago museum...

"The tablets—known as the Persepolis Collection—were taken out of
country at different periods of time and under different excuses," said
Mohammad Reza Kargar, director of the Museums and Historical Moveable
Properties Office at ICHHTO, IRNA reported. "Restitution of the tablets
has been a controversial issue, but the saga is nearing its end now."
While historical objects taken of a country can be tracked via various
channels, such as Interpol, the process is long and complex as it
requires the plaintiff to first provide proof of ownership and then
supply evidence that the objects were taken out illegally.

"Even more, the process is costly," Kargar said.

The Persepolis Collection includes about 30,000 clay tablets and
fragments that Iran loaned to the Oriental Institute in 1937 for
research, translation and cataloguing. It contains 300 tablets dating
back to the Achaemenid era (550–330 BC), which are impressed in
cuneiform and record administrative details of the ancient Persian
Empire.

Eight Americans injured in a Hamas suicide bombing in 1997 and their
families had moved to seize the artifacts to satisfy a US court ruling
that Iran owed the victims $71.5 million for its alleged involvement in
the attack.

However, several US-based media, including the Chicago Daily Law
Bulletin, reported last summer that the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals
held that the Field Museum of Natural History and the University of
Chicago’s Oriental Institute are not required to turn over the
antiquities to the eight victims.

Kargar noted that Iran is awaiting one more court ruling related to the
Persepolis Collection, "which is expected to be in our favor". A large
haul of Iran’s stolen artifacts have been repatriated over the past two
years. A shipment of 349 ancient relics was returned from Belgium in
December 2014 after 33 years, following a ruling by a court in Brussels.

In April 2015, over 100 historical artifacts taken from the
archeological site of Choghamish in Khuzestan Province were returned by
the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, after The Hague in the
Netherlands ruled in favor of Iran and obliged the US to repatriate the
objects. In July 2015, the government in Rome returned a shipment of 30
relics dating back to the pre-Islamic era, while about 73 smuggled
relics, including seal impressions from the Sassanid era (224–651), were
returned to Tehran in May.

Iran’s cultural heritage officials have urged Iranian expats to report
stolen Iranian artifacts to help bring the relics back home. They have
been called upon to use the online portal, www.ichto.it, to share information they may have regarding Iranian stolen artifacts.

CHICAGO — In a rare case, a museum collection will not be used to
satisfy a judgment against another nation - in this case, the country of
Iran, which has been accused of having sponsored a 1997 terrorist
attack in Jerusalem in which eight Americans were injured.

On July 19, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled
Chicago's Field Museum and the University of Chicago’s Oriental
Institute are not required to return ancient Persian artifacts over to
the victims of the attack.

The artifacts, if turned over, would have helped to satisfy a judgment of $71.5 million against Iran.The appeals court upheld a lower court's ruling that the survivors
of the 1997 terrorist attack, which has been blamed partly on Iran,
cannot seize the Persian antiquities which include a large Persepolis
Fortification tablet with cuneiform text from more than 2,000 years ago.

The Americans who had sued Iran were injured in the September 1997
Hamas suicide bombing in which bombers, affiliated with the Palestinian
group Hamas, detonated suicide bombs in a pedestrian mall in Jerusalem.

“This is a rare case,” said Derek Fincham, Associate Professor of Law at the Houston College of Law.He said using museum or university collections to satisfy judgments has rarely been successful.

“The 7th Circuit in this case had already denied the plaintiff’s
efforts to secure the judgments," he said. "In other words, they won on
the merits because Iran did not contest the case."

The ruling was formally a denial of an en banc rehearing, or a
hearing before all the judges of the appeals court, by a larger number
of the 7th Circuit judges, not just the three judge panel that decided
the earlier case. “En banc appeals are rarely successful, because three judges have
already decided the case and rarely will a case merit the full
complement of appeals court judges in any circuit,” Fincham said.

Two of the four collections of artifacts sought by the victims are
not owned by Iran, the court stated. The country does own a third
collection, but in 1970 the Oriental Institute returned most of those
artifacts under the advice of the U.S. State Department.

A fourth collection, which includes approximately 30,000 clay
tablets and segments, was loaned to the Oriental Institute for research
from Iran in the 1930s.

The court wrote that the collection is owned by Iran and is in the
possession of the University of Chicago and are immune from attachment
and execution as property of a foreign state under the Foreign Sovereign
Immunities Act.

“Plaintiffs will always be concerned with how they can get paid
when they win, but that is exceedingly hard when as in this case, Iran
did not even participate in the litigation as a defendant,” Fincham
said.He said it is a unique situation where the defendant must not
really have any commercial relationship with the United States for it to
work.

“I think the case was rightly decided. A ruling otherwise would
have had devastating consequences for the loan of artwork and study
collections at museums and universities,” Fincham said.

Fincham said the tablets are an important research collection, but doesn’t suspect that any of the tablets are display quality.

“Rather, they tell us valuable information about Persepolis, the ancient city, and the Persian culture,” Fincham said.

The market value of the tablets is unsure, but there are thousands of fragments.

“Had they been sold, they would have probably gone to private
collectors who may not have been able to care for them, study them or
even preserve them as a set so they can be studied,” Fincham said.Fincham said the court’s decision was a good result for the artifacts in question.

“The poor victims of the attacks, though, will have to seek a remedy some other way,” he said.

A federal appeals court has ruled
that terrorism victims can’t seize priceless Iranian artifacts held by
the University of Chicago in fulfillment of a judgment against the
Islamic Republic of Iran. This is a good decision in practical terms,
but it was tailor-made to protect the collection and the university. And
it creates a conflict with another Court of Appeals, opening the door
to potential Supreme Court review.

The case arose as a result of a
lawsuit by family members of victims of a 1997 Hamas suicide bombing in
Jerusalem. The victims’ families sued Iran on the theory that it
supported Hamas. Iran didn’t appear to defend itself in the suit, and a
federal court awarded the families a $71.5 million, which hasn’t been
paid.The
families’ lawyers have been looking around the country for assets
belonging to the government of Iran that they could attach, seize and
sell to get the damages they are owed. Advisedly or not, they decided to
go after four collections of antiquities that supposedly belonged to
Iran but are held by Chicago-area museums.

The case ended up in
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. It first took three
of the four collections out of the case, in two instances because it
held they didn’t actually belong to Iran, and in the other because the
collection was physically returned to Iran by the University of Chicago.

That
left the Persepolis collection, one of the great caches of literary
artifacts from the ancient world. In 1930, the Shah of Iran lent the
collection of tablets to the University of Chicago for study. It remains
in the Oriental Institute
of the university, where it has garnered significant scholarly
attention and helped produce important scholarship on ancient Iran.

In
general, a foreign government’s assets can’t be seized in the U.S. in
fulfillment of a judgment. That’s a basic principle derived from the
doctrine of sovereign immunity, which says that states can’t be dragged
into court without their permission.

But sovereign immunity has
exceptions -- and the families pointed to two possible exceptions in
support of their claim to seize the antiquities.

One exception is
for property used in commercial activity. The Seventh Circuit could have
simply held that studying ancient tablets in the university setting
isn’t commercial activity. (In fact, as someone originally trained in a
faculty of Oriental studies, I can’t imagine a less commercial activity
on earth.)... [Read the rest]

American victims of a 1997 terrorist bombing can't claim ancient Persian artifacts held at the University of Chicago to satisfy a multimillion-dollar judgment against Iran for its role in the attack, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled.

A three-judge panel found on July 19 that there is no "freestanding" exception in state-sponsored terrorism cases to the immunity that shields foreign governments under U.S. law. The Seventh Circuit's decision conflicts with the Ninth Circuit, which held earlier this year that there was such an exception.

The circuit split sets the stage for possible review by the U.S. Supreme Court. Last year, the justices ruled in a state-sponsored terrorism case, finding that victims with judgments against Iran could collect nearly $2 billion in Iranian assets held in a U.S. bank.At issue in the Seventh Circuit case is a collection of approximately 30,000 clay tablets from the ancient Persian city of Persepolis. Iran in 1937 loaned the Persepolis Collection to the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, where it remains.The plaintiffs — victims of a 1997 bombing in Jerusalem and their families — won a $71.5 million default judgment in federal court in Washington, D.C. Iran doesn't usually participate in terror litigation in U.S. courts and did not pay the judgment. Iran owes hundreds of billions of dollars in judgments in state-sponsored terrorism cases.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs went to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois to claim what they contended were Iranian assets within the court's jurisdiction — the Persian artifacts at the University of Chicago. They claimed other collections at the university and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago as well, but those are no longer part of the case.Foreign governments are generally granted immunity against civil claims in U.S. courts, but there are exceptions, including in terrorism cases. The Seventh Circuit panel said the federal Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act did not include a "freestanding" exception in terrorism cases, agreeing with arguments advanced by lawyers for the University of Chicago, Iran and the U.S. government.

Judge Diane Sykes, writing for the panel, said plaintiffs had to meet the criteria of other exceptions under the immunities law. The plaintiffs argued the artifacts fell under a "commercial activity" exception, but the court disagreed, finding that the Iranian government wasn't using the artifacts for commercial purposes in the United States.Seventh Circuit Judge William Bauer and Chief Judge Michael Reagan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, sitting by special designation, joined the decision.Asher Perlin of Florida Professional Law Group in Hollywood, Florida, who argued for the plaintiffs, said in an email that they are weighing options for "further review.""Obviously we are disappointed with the majority's decision," Perlin said.Baker & McKenzie partner Matthew Allison argued for the University of Chicago. MoloLamken founding partner Jeffrey Lamken argued for Iran. Neither was reached for comment on Wednesday.

A full sitting of the Seventh Circuit won't hear the case. Given the split with the Ninth Circuit and the fact that the court reversed earlier precedent, the case went before all active judges for a vote. But five of the 10 active judges recused — Chief Judge Diane Wood and Judges Richard Posner and Frank Easterbook teach at the University of Chicago; Judges Ilana Rovner and Joel Flaum had other conflicts — so an en banc sitting was not possible.Judge David Hamilton dissented from the denial of en banc review. He wrote that the immunities law was ambiguous and that the Ninth Circuit reached the right conclusion.

"We must choose one side or the other," Hamilton wrote. "The balance here should weigh in favor of the reading that favors the victims. We should not attribute to Congress an intent to be so solicitous of state sponsors of terrorism, who are also undeserving beneficiaries of the unusual steps taken by the Rubin panel."

A federal appeals court Tuesday declined to clear the way for victims
of a terrorist attack financed by Iran to use ancient Persian artifacts
to help satisfy a $71.5 million judgment against that nation.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held the Field Museum of
Natural History and the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute are
not required to turn over the antiquities to the eight victims.

Iran does not own two of the four collections sought by the victims, a panel of the court wrote.

Iran owns a third collection, the panel wrote, but the Oriental
Institute returned most of those artifacts in 1970 and the remainder
within the last two years at the direction of the U.S. State Department.

The fourth collection includes about 30,000 clay tablets and
fragments that Iran loaned to the Oriental Institute in 1937 for
research, translation and cataloguing, the panel wrote.

The Persepolis Collection, it wrote, is owned by Iran and is in the possession of the University of Chicago.But as the property of a foreign state, these artifacts are immune
from attachment and execution, the panel held, citing the Foreign
Sovereign Immunities Act.

The panel conceded there are exceptions to this general rule.

A litigant seeking to satisfy a judgment against a foreign state may
take property “used for a commercial activity in the United States,”
Judge Diane S. Sykes wrote for the panel, quoting Section 1610(a) of the
FSIA.However, she wrote, Iran has not used the artifacts in the Persepolis Collection for any commercial purpose.Citing Bennett v. Islamic Republic of Iran, Nos. 13-15442
and 15-16100, 2016 WL 3257780 (9th Cir. June 14, 2016), the panel also
conceded that the 9th Circuit in San Francisco last month held that
Section 1610(g) of the FSIA allows victims of state-sponsored terrorism
to attach assets even if they are not used for commercial purposes.

It disagrees with the 9th Circuit’s ruling that Section 1610(g) is a
freestanding exception to execution immunity, the panel wrote.

“To the extent that Gates and Wyatt can be read as
holding that Section 1610(g) is a freestanding exception to execution
immunity for terrorism-related judgments, they are overruled,” Sykes
wrote.

Joining the opinion were Judge William J. Bauer and Chief U.S.
District Judge Michael J. Reagan of the Central District of Illinois,
who sat on the 7th Circuit by designation.

Because its opinion overrules 7th Circuit precedent and conflicts
with the 9th Circuit’s ruling on the issue, the panel wrote, it
circulated its opinion to all the active judges on the court to consider
the possibility of a rehearing en banc.

But Chief Judge Diane P. Wood and Judges Richard A. Posner, Joel M.
Flaum, Frank H. Easterbrook and Ilana Diamond Rovner did not
participate, the panel wrote, and therefore a majority of the active
judges did not vote for the entire court to rehear the case.

The panel did not say why the five judges did not participate.

Judge David F. Hamilton did not serve on the panel, but he used a
dissent from the denial of en banc review to object to the panel’s
holding.

The text of Section 1610(g) is ambiguous and, therefore, both the 7th
Circuit’s and the 9th Circuit’s interpretations of that provision are
reasonable, Hamilton wrote.

“The courts must choose between two statutory readings: [O]ne that
favors state sponsors of terrorism and another that favors the victims
of that terrorism,” he wrote.

Congress, he wrote, has extended the remedies for such victims over the years.

“The balance here should weigh in favor of the reading that favors the victims,” he wrote.

The plaintiffs were among the 200 people who were injured when three
Hamas suicide bombers blew themselves up in Jerusalem in September 1997.
Five other people were killed.

The plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C.,
seeking damages against Iran, which financed Hamas, and several
individuals.

In 2003, they were awarded $71.5 million in damages in a default
judgment against Iran. The judgment amounted to more than $400 million
when the punitive damages the individual defendants were ordered to pay
were included.

The plaintiffs have attempted to collect the judgment against Iran by seeking to attach its assets in the United States.

In the lawsuit filed in federal court in Chicago, U.S. District Judge
Robert W. Gettleman held there are no exceptions in either the FSIA or
the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 that allow the plaintiffs to
attach the museum exhibits.

The 7th Circuit panel agreed with Gettleman.

The insurance act, the panel wrote, allows terrorism victims who
obtain a judgment against the offending nation to execute on assets that
are “blocked” by executive order under certain international sanction
provisions.

But there is no executive order blocking the artifacts sought by the plaintiffs, the panel wrote.Asher Perlin of Florida Professional Law Group PLLC in Hollywood,
Fla., argued the case before the 7th Circuit on behalf of the
plaintiffs.

Matthew G. Allison of Baker & McKenzie LLP argued the case on behalf of the museums.Jeffrey A. Lamken of MoloLamken LLP in Washington, D.C., argued the case on behalf of the Iranian government.

Benjamin M. Schultz of the U.S. Justice Department in Washington
argued the case on behalf of the government. The United States took part
in the case as amicus curiae supporting the position of Iran and the
museums.

Justice Department spokeswoman Nicole A. Navas declined to comment.

Oriental Institute Director Gil J. Stein said he is pleased with the ruling.

“While the university abhors the acts of terrorism that lead to this
proceeding, the artifacts at issue here are not subject to attachment
under either the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act or the Terrorism Risk
and Insurance Act,” he wrote in an e-mail. “The Institute looks forward
to continuing its research on the Persepolis Collection, artifacts which
provide unparalleled insight into the history and languages of the
Persian Empire around 500 B.C.”

The Field Museum and the attorneys either did not have an immediate comment or could not be reached for comment.

"The court recognizes the tragic circumstances that gave rise to the instant action, but finds that the law cited by plaintiffs does not offer the remedy they seek." With these words, Judge Robert Gettleman ended the Northern District of Illinois case of Jenny Rubin, et al. v. Islamic Republic of Iran, et al. v. The University of Chicago and The Field Museum of Natural History.

The case involves American victims of a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 1997. A federal judge in Washington, DC in 2003 awarded the plaintiffs a $71.5 million default judgment against Iran, holding that country to be responsible for the attack. One way the plaintiffs have sought to collect the judgment is to acquire ancient Iranian artifacts at prominent American Museums, including Chicago's Oriental Institute (OI) and The Field Museum, through attachment. [Read the rest]

Collections assistant Sarah
Coleman works with ancient Persian artifacts at the Field Museum in
2006.
(Charles Osgood, Chicago Tribune / February 9, 2006)

The University of Chicago and
The Field Museum won’t have to turn over ancient Persian artifacts in
their possession to help resolve a legal settlement owed to survivors of
a terrorist attack, a federal judge has ruled.

In a long-running court battle, nine American victims of the 1997
attack in Jerusalem sued Iran, where the artifacts were excavated, for
being a financial supporter of Hamas, the Palestinian extremist group.

The victims won a multimillion-dollar court judgment.

To collect on that, attorneys
for the plaintiffs have been trying to gain control of Iranian assets
in the United States, including artifacts the Chicago museum has had for
decades, according to the ruling.

In Thursday’s decision, U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman held
that the plaintiffs’ argument was flawed because there was no evidence
that Iran has asserted ownership over the collections.

“The court recognizes the tragic circumstances that gave rise to the
instant action, but finds the law cited by the plaintiffs does not offer
the remedy they seek,” Gettleman said in the decision.

Keepers of the Chicago collections said the pieces were priceless and welcomed the court’s ruling.

“These ancient artifacts...have unique historical and cultural
value,” said Gil Stein, director of the University of Chicago’s Oriental
Institute in a statement. The university “will continue our efforts to
preserve and protect this cultural heritage,” he said.

David Strachman, an attorney for the victims who brought the lawsuit,
said his clients were particularly upset that the U.S. State Department
“takes the side of Iran in these cases.”

Once upon a time people used something called paper
for writing all sorts of things, from love letters to secret sauce
formulas to stockholder reports. It was when writing was just
word-winding.

They say some hyper competitive Silicon Valley companies (there was
no other known kind) even went as far as hiring detectives to sort
through paper trash of their competitors to patch together highly
guarded business secrets.

This paper was made of trees that grew wild in the nature-in places
people of old used to call forests. There were all sorts of round
trees and all kinds of flat paper.
Something called deforestation saw to the end of these green forests and paper became rare and eventually extinct.

People didn’t stop writing, they wrote even more. But instead of
real paper, they started to use old software programs that
nostalgically looked like pages of white paper on computer screens, but
they were really nothing more than zeroes and ones, stored on
primitive hard drives.

As everyone knows those clunky computers eventually became obsolete
too when we started to use glasses and tablets and watches and other
things to record our blinkings and doings and thinkings.

Now and then one of those ancient paper archives called Libraries
that have miraculously survived shredders and recyclers are discovered
here and there. Page-turning paper-lovers from all over the world
immediately converge on the discovery pits to make sure these antiquated
archives don’t turn into dust during excavations...

...

...In 2006 Dr. Matthew Stolper, one of
handful of specialists on Elamite language in the world, cleared his
plate, assembled a stellar team of scholars from a number of American
and European universities, embarked on the never-ending quest for
(much) needed grants, and took on the emergency task of digitization of
the Achaemenid archive-known as the Persepolis Fortification Archive
Project (PFAP). And here we are.

Under Matt Stolper’s steadfast watch and with the moral support of
his faithful friend, Baxter the Beast, the initial phase of cleaning,
conserving and digitizing the archive is finally reaching critical mass
and the next phase of making sense of the mass of generated data is
kicking in-the old sprinkling of the water of life on dead bones.

In the process, surprising new discoveries have come to light, among them finding the footprint of Udusana (Greek: Atossa),
the quintessential Achaemenid royal woman (queen), who, according to
the classical writers, was the eldest daughter of Cyrus the Great, the
chief wife of Darius the Great, and the powerful mother of Xerxes
(Persian: Xsayarsa, or Khshayarsha). Triple Crown of Persian royalty.

These Persian administrative records, roughly 30,000 or so pieces
from a single archive, dating from 509 to 493 BCE (from 13th to 28th
regnal years of Darius the Great, about 16 years, with some references
to the 7th regnal year)-conceptually likened to the bones of a
dinosaur-have led to not just an understanding of the routine imperial
administrative infrastructure, but all sorts of interesting things like
art, language, religion, and society of the Persian Achaemenid Empire,
that was unknowable merely from the traditional biblical and classical
sources.

The sort of raw data that the large cuneiform archives like the
Persepolis Fortification Archive have been yielding is “Big
Data”-datasets that are getting too big to process using classical
computing techniques. Big Data is now being used in computer technology
circles to refer to the latest advances in aggregating massive amounts
of data from various sources and enabling researchers to mine and map
data in amazing new ways-see what no one has seen before, ask questions
no one has answered yet.

On the academic side of the coin, Big Data research will eventually
exponentially expand the newly-minted field of Digital Humanities.

While virtualization and visualization of archival data from the
Achaemenid royal chancelleries will not give us historical answers-at
least not to what we think-it will, however, provide a richer context
for understanding and interpreting the Big Data we have accidentally inherited and luckily recovered.

This Big Data is also the playground of writers like me who troll
the archival treasure troves for historical backstory to turn boring
administrative records into sizzling stories about the adventurous
lives and scandalous love affairs of the Persian royal sons and
daughters-kings and their queens who once ruled the world-the real royal
games of the only throne that really mattered. Masters of Asia.

Achaemenid scholars have been spending years carefully
reconstructing a clay dinosaur to restore Persians to the history of
the world, and the Persian storytellers thankfully ride this
paper-beast to restore the Persians to the story of the world. Dr. Stolper, now retired as of the end of 2013, is continuing as
the head of the PFA Project, crisscrossing the globe on a mission to
evangelize the immense impact of the ancient archive on Persian
Achaemenid history and heritage.

In recognition of his lifelong achievements and his tireless
efforts in preserving and promoting the integration of knowledge from
the Achaemenid Administrative Archives into mainstream classical and
ancient Near Eastern (ANE) studies, there would be a celebration at the
Oriental Institute tentatively scheduled for 28 April 2014.

These types of events are normally planned for the local
colleagues, students and patrons of the institute. This one, however,
might just turn out to be a greater gathering of the friends of the
Persepolis Fortification Archive Project, die-hard supporters of
Persian history and heritage, and the who-is-who of the Persian
Achaemenid studies.

Tell Parnakka (probably the paternal uncle of Darius the Great and
the first chief of the imperial administrative archives at Parsa) to
order more Shiraz wine for the feast. Persians are coming.

Abdul
Majid Arfaei, a professor of Ancient Near Eastern languages and
cultures, has translated ‘The Inscriptions of Persepolis’ in four
volumes which have been handed over to the Cultural Heritage
Organization for publication.

IBNA:
Abdul Majid Arfaei said he has finished translating 647 tablets,
related to the era of Darius the Great, which were read by Richard
Treadwell Hallock. The works are included in the first volume of the
series.

Richard Treadwell Hallock, Elamologist and
Assyriologist, was a professor of Chicago University. The late
professor, who read the bulk of the Persepolis Elamite tablets, died in
1980.

The Iranian researcher has also translated 2,586 clay
Achaemenid tablets into Persian and English which were rendered by
Hallock.

The work is also handed over to Iran’s Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization (ICHHTO) for publication.

The three other books of the ‘The Inscriptions of Persepolis’ will be published in Iran gradually.

Arfaei,
the renowned expert of Elamite, Avestan and Pahlavi languages, is the
founder of the Inscriptions Hall of Iran’s National Museum and has
written a number of books on Iranian history.

He is the only Iranian Elamologist who worked under the supervision of Professor Hallock.

Arfaei was the first person who translated the inscription of Cyrus Cylinder.

The Iranian expert has also translated more than 2,500 Persepolis inscriptions, which are housed at Chicago University.

TEHRAN (FNA)- Vice-president and head of the
Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Organization (CHTHO) Mohammad
Ali Najafi vowed to follow up the case with returning Iran’s ancient
tablets during his upcoming visit to New York.

“One of my programs during the visit to New York will be meeting with
Chancellor of Chicago University to discuss the return of about 30,000
Achaemenid tablets which are now in New York to Iran …,” Najafi said,
saying that his name has been included in the list of the delegation
which will be accompanying Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in his
upcoming visit to New York.

President Rouhani will participate in the 68th annual meeting of the
UN General Assembly in New York due to open on 17 September, Iranian
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif announced earlier.

In August, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon invited
Iranian President Rouhani to participate in the annual meeting of the UN
General Assembly in September.

The tablets were discovered by the University of Chicago
archaeologists in 1933 while they were excavating in Persepolis, the
site of a major Oriental Institute excavation.

The artifacts bear cuneiform script explaining administrative details
of the Achaemenid Empire from about 500 BC. They are among a group of
tens of thousands of tablets and tablet fragments that were loaned to
the university's Oriental Institute in 1937 for study. A group of 179
complete tablets was returned in 1948, and another group of more than
37,000 tablet fragments was returned in 1951.

In spring 2006, US District Court Judge Blanche Manning ruled that a
group of people injured by a 1997 bombing in Israel could seize the 300
clay tablets loaned to the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute
and the university cannot protect Iran's ownership rights to the
artifacts.

Following Iranian officials' protests against the ruling, the court
was slated to reexamine the case on December 21, 2006, but the court
session was postponed to January 19, 2007, allegedly due to the fact
that Iran had not provided all the documents required by the court.

The court session was held on the above-mentioned date, but no verdict was issued.

Museum of London has voiced its support for the return of the
collection of clay tablets to Iran as the owner of the artifacts.

The Oriental Institute holds 8000 to 10,000 intact and about 11,000
fragmented tablets, as estimated by Gil Stein, the director of the
university's Oriental Institute.

Based on a bill approved by the Iranian parliament in 1930, foreign
research institutes were allowed to conduct excavations at Iranian
ancient sites exclusively or during joint projects with the Iranian
government.

Foreigners were also given permission to share the artifacts
discovered during the excavation projects with Iranian team members and
to transfer their share to their country.

By the act, many Iranian artifacts were looted by foreign institutes
working on Iranian ancient sites until the victory of the Islamic
Revolution in 1979.

The Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute filed a motion for summary judgment last week seeking to end a case that has pitted victims of a terrorist attack against two Illinois museums and Iran. The Chicago-based institutions argue that the plaintiffs' wish to take museum "property that Iran neither owns nor has ever claimed." And regarding Persian artifacts owned by Iran but on loan to the museums, the museums say that the plaintiffs cannot take title to these objects in order to satisfy a court judgment. American lawyers representing Iran filed their own motion in agreement [Read the rest]

The
First Circuit Court of Appeals on February 27, 2013 decided in favor of
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) and Harvard’s museums in the case
of Rubin v. Iran.

The case involves victims of a 1997
Iranian-backed terrorist bombing who seek to satisfy a multi-million
dollar default court judgment awarded to them in 2003. Since 2005 the
Rubin plaintiffs have argued that approximately 2000 reliefs,
sculptures, and other archaeological objects located at the MFA and
Harvard are the property of Iran that can be seized. The cultural
institutions have been contesting that claim, and yesterday the First
Circuit agreed.

The appeals court decision extended its
sympathies to the the plaintiffs, saying “we are mindful of the incident
that gave rise to the judgment here and the difficulty the plaintiffs
are having collecting on that judgment ….” But the justices upheld “the
general rule … that foreign sovereign property in the United States is
immune from attachment and execution” because of the Foreign Sovereign
Immunity Act (FSIA). 28 U.S.C. § 1609.

The appeals court
acknowledged that the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 (TRIA)
“carves out a narrow exception to that rule, applicable only to ‘blocked
assets,’” but wrote that “the plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate
that any of the antiquities in the Museums' possession fall within that
exception.”

The MFA and Harvard argued in the lower federal
district court that Iran does not own the cultural objects. Even if they
were owned by Iran, the MFA and Harvard maintained that the FSIA makes
the objects immune from attachment...

The
U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled Wednesday that people
injured by a terrorist attack financed by Iran cannot make a claim on
Iranian antiquities held in a Harvard University museum. Several
Americans with claims against Iran have tried to collect money owed by
that nation by going after antiquities at various American institutions.
But the appeals court ruled -- as other courts have ruled -- that there
are very limited circumstances in which artifacts can be seized as
assets, and that this is not one of them. The legal challenges to
ownership of these antiquities have worried many museum officials who
have feared that they would be unable to obtain loans of art from other
countries if that art might be seized.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012This post is researched, written, and published on the blog Cultural
Heritage Lawyer Rick St. Hilaire at culturalheritagelawyer.blogspot.com.

The First Circuit Court of Appeals today heard arguments about the meaning of the word "of" in the case of Rubin v. Iran. The Rubin
plaintiffs wish to seize "property of Iran" after receiving a
multi-million dollar court judgment holding that country responsible for
injuries caused by a terrorist attack. The litigants have been unable
to obtain payment; therefore, they seek to execute the judgment by
taking ancient Iranian cultural artifacts housed at the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts (MFA) and the Harvard museums. After losing their case in
the lower federal district court, the plaintiffs appealed.

The attorney for the plaintiffs/appellants told the judges today, "We
don't really care, frankly, whether or not the property actually belongs
to Iran." explaining "All we care about is whether the property is 'of
Iran.'" "What does the word 'of'' mean?," counsel asked. He answered
that "...the word 'of' does not always mean possession."...

Americans attempting to get redress from
the Islamic Republic of Iran want to take possession of the artifacts,
currently on loan at the Oriental Institute.

For nearly 10 years, a lawsuit against the state of Iran has turned
the Oriental Institute into a battleground over 2,500-year-old Persian
artifacts.

This past Saturday, Professor Matthew Stolper, head of the
Institute’s Persepolis Fortification Archive Project, gave an update on
what he called a “salvage excavation” and revealed the innovative
technology that might decide the artifacts’ future.

More than just “pieces of dirt that someone poked with sticks a very
long time ago,” the archive is “the largest, the most complex, the best
dated source of information from within the Persian Empire at its
zenith,” Stolper said.

The tens of thousands of fragments, pieces of old administrative
records excavated from Persepolis ruins in the 1930s, have been a
treasure chest for understanding Persian language, religion, daily life
and politics. “This loan was an extraordinary thing—an extraordinary
act of trust,” Stolper said, since the Institute has been allowed to
keep the artifacts on loan from Iran during the pending law suit.

“A completely unique discovery is sent off to an American research
institute and it is sent intact—it is sent as if they knew it was all
one thing. This is almost without precedent in the annals of cultural
study,” Stolper said.

If the plaintiffs, Americans who lost relatives in 1997 terrorist
attacks in Israel, win, the tablets may be sold and dispersed. If they
lose, then Iran may demand the artifacts’ immediate return, according to
Stolper. The plaintiffs were already awarded redress money that Iran
refused to pay, so the plaintiffs are seeking this Iranian property in
the U.S. as an alternative form of payment.Stolper took a moment to remind the audience that the plaintiffs had
lost their loved ones in a terrorist attack and reacted within the legal
channels granted by the judicial system. “There’s a tendency to say
[about the lawsuit], ‘What a terrible barbaric thing,”” Stolper said.
“The plaintiffs are not greedy barbarians. They are seeking redress.”

The Institute has responded with innovative steps to preserve the
artifacts, digitally and on the Internet. By publicly sharing infrared
and photo-edited images of the tablets, alongside intensive linguistic
analysis, the Institute is pushing archaeological record-keeping into
the 21st century. “Sometimes the images are more useful than the
original objects,” Stolper said.

Stolper left his audience and future generations, he hopes, with a
challenge. “If I can’t convince you it’s something you should be excited
about, at least I can convince you it’s something one can be excited
about,” he said.

Monday, July 9, 2012

The case of
Jenny Rubin, et al. v. Islamic Republic of Iran has been
restarted in federal district court in Illinois (docket 03-cv-9370).
That is because the United States Supreme Court on June 25 declined to
hear the Rubin plaintiffs' request to review the Seventh Circuit decision, which ruled against them. Justices Antonin Scalia and Elena Kagan did not participate in the decision.

Rubin and the other plaintiffs are trying to recover a court-awarded
money judgment against Iran for that nation's sponsorship of a deadly
terrorist attack that harmed the parties. They wish to acquire Persian
artifacts located at Chicago's Field Museum and the University of
Chicago in order execute the judgment. The case moved from the federal
district court in northern Illinois to the circuit court of appeals.
The case was to be sent back to the district court by the appeals
court, but the Rubin plaintiffs sought review by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The high court has now returned the case to the district court, where a
status hearing is scheduled for July 18 at 3:00 p.m.

In a companion case
now in the First Circuit Court of Appeals, the same parties seek to
acquire Persian artifacts held at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in
Boston and at Harvard. The United States filed an amicus brief (i.e.
friend of the court brief) on June 7 in support of the MFA, the Harvard
museums, and Iran.

Federal lawyers argue two points in their brief to the First Circuit.
They say that the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) does not
authorize the attachment of property not owned by a terrorist state.
Second, the government asserts that Iranian property cannot be
“contested” within the meaning of the Iranian Assets Control Regulations
because "Iran itself has not articulated any claim to the property in
question."

The government writes:"The
United States emphatically condemns the act of terrorism that
grievously injured the plaintiffs, and has deep sympathy for their
suffering. The United States remains committed to disrupting terrorist
financing and to aggressively pursuing those responsible for committing
terrorist acts against U.S. nationals. In addition, however, the United
States has a strong interest in ensuring that courts properly interpret
TRIA’s scope. Normally, unless a person obtains a license from the
Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), that
person is barred from attaching assets that are blocked under various
sanctions programs, such as the Iranian Assets Control Regulations."

The lawyers add:"The
district court found that Iran does not, in fact, own the assets in
question. The United States takes no position on the question of
ownership. If this Court affirms the district court’s holding, however,
that ruling will also preclude attachment of the assets under TRIA. TRIA
does not, as plaintiffs contend, permit them to attach the artifacts
possessed by the Museums if those assets are not owned by Iran."

The government concludes that the court "should
hold that the Museums’ artifacts cannot be attached under TRIA unless
the plaintiffs establish that Iran owns the artifacts. Additionally, if
the Court reaches the issue, it should hold that an asset is not “contested” for purposes of [the Iranian Assets Control Regulations] unless Iran itself is claiming an interest in the asset."

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Saying that the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals got it right, the US Solicitor General told the Supreme Court last week to reject the case of Rubin v. Iran.

Lawyers
for Jenny Rubin and other injured litigants who won a judgment against
Iran for its sponsorship of a 1997 terrorist attack have been trying to
collect a multi-million dollar court award by attempting to seize
ancient Persian artifacts located at the Oriental Institute at the
University of Chicago and the Chicago Field Museum. The Seventh Circuit
on March 29, 2011 sent the case back to the federal district court in
Illinois for review. But the Rubin plaintiffs instead sought review by
the nation's highest court. See here for more background

Friday, June 1, 2012

"The
order of the district court should be affirmed." That is the simple
conclusion written in the Harvard Art Museums' appellate brief filed
yesterday in the case of Rubin et al. v. Islamic Republic of Iran v. Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard University et al. The appeal is pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Friday, June 1, 2012

"The
order of the district court should be affirmed." That is the simple
conclusion written in the Harvard Art Museums' appellate brief filed
yesterday in the case of Rubin et al. v. Islamic Republic of Iran v. Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard University et al. The appeal is pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Jenny
Rubin and others hurt by a 1997 terrorist attack in Israel filed a 92
page brief yesterday in the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Rubin et al. v. Islamic Republic of Iran v. Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard University et al. is
a case where the appellants seek to enforce a judgment awarded to them
under the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 (TRIA) by acquiring
cultural artifacts claimed to be owned by Iran. The objects sought are
located in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Meanwhile, Rubin et al.
have also filed an appeal of their Seventh Circuit court case with the
U.S. Supreme Court. That case involves an attempt to attach objects
located at museums in Chicago.

The rush to document thousands of ancient texts before they are
sent back to Iran, or sold, reveals the daily workings of the Persian
Empire
Tens
of thousands of clay tablets and fragments from Persepolis are written
in cuneiform to express Elamite, an ancient language of western Iran.
(Courtesy Persepolis Fortification Archive Project, Oriental Institute)

Tensions between Iran and the United States have rarely run higher, with
both governments sparring over alleged terror plots, disputing the
nature of Iran’s nuclear program, and vying to influence the uprisings
across the Arab world. But in Chicago and Boston courtrooms, the two
countries have found rare common ground—neither wants ancient tablets
from the royal palace of Persepolis in Iran to end up on the auction
block. To the relief of scholars, two recent court rulings may give them
their joint wish, preserving open access to what is the most
significant source of information on the ancient Persian Empire
uncovered to date.

In the early 1930s, during excavations of Persepolis, University of
Chicago archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld unearthed tens of thousands of
fragments of fragile clay tablets dating from about 500 B.C. The
fragments were packed into 2,353 cardboard boxes and shipped to the
university’s Oriental Institute. The Iranian government of the day
allowed the export, with the understanding that the tablets would be
translated and then returned. But the task of piecing together and
understanding the vast number of fragments has been under way for more
than seven decades and the majority of the collection remains in
Chicago. Now, fearing loss of the archive, the university has moved into
high gear to create thousands of digital images of the tablets, which
record the day-to-day accounts of the empire during the reign of Darius
the Great (521–486 B.C.) and include records of those traveling on
behalf of the king, lists of workers’ rations, and careful notation of
offerings made to deities.

Researchers hope to have most of this intensive effort completed within
the next two years. To get the job done, the institute has assembled
what Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute, calls a “dream team”
of textual scholars, archaeologists, and technical experts in digital
cataloguing to take images of the tablets and make them available for
public use. Translations are also being done, though it will take much
longer to complete that daunting task. “Whether they are seized for sale
or the government of Iran demands them back, the tablets will be out of
the building soon. We all understand how important and urgent this is,”
says Stein.

A Massachusetts federal court has ruled that the Museum of Fine Arts and
Harvard University will not lose their collection of ancient Persian
objects to eight plaintiffs injured in a 1997 terrorist bombing. The
United States District Court, District of Massachusetts, issued a five
page opinion on September 15, 2011 denying the plaintiffs’ efforts to
gain control over the artifacts to satisfy their multi-million dollar
court judgment against the government of Iran.

Jenny Rubin and several other Americans were injured in Jerusalem after
Hamas carried out three bombings. Because the terrorist group received
backing from Iran, the eight plaintiffs sued the government of Iran in
federal district court in Washington, DC, winning a $71.5 million
default award after the Iranian government failed to show up to court.
Since then, the plaintiffs have sought to recover that judgment.

The government of Iran would not be expected to pay the court award, so
the plaintiffs searched for local Iranian assets to seize. One place
they looked was Boston/Cambridge, Massachusetts, where museums housed
artifacts excavated from ancient Iran. The plaintiffs initiated a court
action--known as an attachment--against the Boston Museum of Fine Arts,
Harvard, the Harvard University Art Museums, the Busch-Reisinger
Museum, the Fogg Art Museum, the Sackler Museum, the Semitic Museums,
and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. But the judge
dismissed the plaintiffs’ case in his recent court order...

Last week, Harvard escaped from a bizarre and potentially damaging lawsuit
after federal judge George A. O’Toole, Jr. threw out a request from a
group representing victims of Iranian terrorist attacks to seize various
Persian artifacts from Harvard. Still awaiting unpaid damages that a
U.S. court ruled they were owed by the Iranian government, the
group—under the leadership of Jenny Rubin—has recently set its sights on
certain artifacts they believe to be the property of the Iranian
government. Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, however, these artifacts
are held in various collections such as the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute and Harvard’s Peabody Museum, which acquired them long before the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979.

And
while Judge O’Toole’s ruling appears in part a straightforward and
appropriate rejection of what seems a patently opportunistic attempt to
benefit financially from both the tainted reputation of the Iranian
regime and a warped view of history, it included a broader stance on the
issue surrounding the ownership of formerly stolen artifacts—a
controversy in which Harvard’s own position, in our view, warrants a
re-evaluation.“As a general matter,” O’Toole wrote,
“establishing that a particular item was unlawfully exported or removed
from Iran is not equivalent to showing that it now should be regarded
as property of Iran subject to levy and execution.”

Of course, we
cannot imagine any other appropriate response to such an attempt. After
all, the argument of Rubin et al concerns an alleged—and obviously
false—association between the Persian Empire and the belligerent Iranian
Islamic “Republic” that currently exists within its former borders.
But, even still, we worry that these words may set some sort of
dangerous legal precedent that gives Western institutions such as
Harvard the right to keep artifacts regardless of the circumstances
under which they were acquired. While Harvard has a very good argument
for keeping possession of the particular items concerned in the Rubin
case, it’s troubling that this case may only lead to Western
institutions keeping a tighter stranglehold over the rest of the world's
stolen cultural heritage...

The main question at issue in Rubin v. Iran, a case
pending in both the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of
Illinois in Chicago and the U.S. District Court for the District of
Massachusetts, is whether national treasures of cultural heritage should
be – or legally can be – subjected to a court-ordered auction to
satisfy judgments. In that case, a group of plaintiffs who won a default
judgment against Iran have asked the Chicago court to seize collections
of Iranian national treasures to be auctioned off – with no guarantee
that they will be auctioned off as collections – so that the proceeds
can be used to satisfy part or all of the judgment...

Even though the Seventh Circuit has ruled, the core
issue still is not resolved. That is, the district court will now have
to answer the main question – can the antiquities be seized and sold at
judicial auction?

Read the article in the Summer 2011 Newsletter of the American Bar Association Art & Cultural Heritage Law Committee.

In 2010 James Dolan, chief executive officer
of Cablevision got paid about $13 million, or about 400 time the wages
of an ordinary you and me. By comparison the manager of the royal
household of the Achaemenid king Darius the Great was paid 700 sheep,
600 loads of flour, and 32000 liters of beer and wine. This is about 100
times the wage of an ordinary Achaemenid postal worker (courier).
Never mind how much Darius got paid—the king was a national symbol, and
therefore beyond labor pricing--but when it comes to income disparity
Achaemenids seem to have the U.S. beaten four to one in terms of social
justice. How do we know how much workers and top administrators got paid
during the Achaemenids?

The information comes from deciphering a fraction of the 12000+
clay tablet “file cabinet” found at Persepolis circa 1930, and now
stored mostly in the U.S. These are the famous Persepolis tablets now
facing death by lawsuit in the U.S. legal system. The U.S. says the IRI
is a state sponsor of terrorism and therefore U.S. citizens can sue Iran
for injury resulting from IRI sponsored terrorist activity. For
example, if Hamas hurts an American citizen during a terrorist attack,
the injured person can sue Iran for supporting Hamas’ act. In fact many
plaintiffs have already won large damages against Iran; the only problem
was how to collect the court awarded money. After some hunting around
in law books, they found out that a loophole in the 2002 Terrorism Risk
Insurance Act (TRIA) allows them to auction off the Persepolis tablets
housed in U.S. universities. That should raise a few million, they
thought.

But just last week the NIAC news email brought good tidings that
some of the tablets have been rescued, apparently through clever use of a
legal technicality. Lawyers defending the tablets in Massachusetts
successfully argued that the plaintiffs couldn’t prove that the items
actually belong to the IRI. To get more detail on the temporarily good
news I talked on the phone with NIAC president Trita Parsi. NIAC has
been involved in the tablet rescue efforts, leading where it can and
assisting where it can. When I asked what would happen to the tablets if
they were auctioned, Parsi’s typically measured interview voice became
troubled:

“When you have a lot of artifacts--as we see in this case--the
relative market value of each item drops. And as has happened before,
the business owners destroy many of the items in order to increase the
value of the remaining ones. We have seen this happen with Egyptian
artifacts in the past. There’s a significant risk. It may actually
happen that there will be a deliberate effort to destroy the stocks to
make sure that the remaining 500 out of the 12000 fetch the best price!
Then this part of our history and heritage will be destroyed.” This is simply barbarism, committed in the name of 21st century
justice. From a perfectly reasonable angle these tablets are just as
important as the Darius Behistun inscriptions or even the Cyrus
Cylinder. Why? Because archeological sites and museums are full of
self-descriptions by rulers of what kick-ass heroes they were and how
justly they ruled. Bein e khodemoon, “Cyrus Cylinder” kings
were a dime a dozen. Even today, Kayhan is a daily Cyrus Cylinder made
out of paper. To give substance to our past we need more than the words
of Cyrus and Darius; we need to audit their receipts. And this is
precisely what these tablets are: receipts, invoices, pay stubs, wage
tables, reimbursement, how much food and wine the priests of different
religions got to offer their gods, etc. sampling several periods of
Achaemenid rule. So far the tablets reveal an empire buzzing with a
complex economy, an active society and run by an intricately structured
administrative system. There’s an astonishing amount of detail about
Achaemenid life in these tablets, beyond what we could have reasonably
hoped; their discovery is a cultural windfall for Iranians. Ironically
if it hadn’t been for another barbaric act—Alexander’s--more than two
millennia ago, these tablets may have been scattered centuries ago. The
quick collapse of the Persepolis building hid the tablets and made them
inaccessible...

June 2, 2011

The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, which is the recipient of two previous PARSA CF grants, has been awarded a $200,000 grant for their important work on capturing, recording, and distributing the information from the famous tablets of the Persepolis Fortification Archive (PFA). The archive is comprised of some 30,000 clay tablets and fragments found in 1933 by the Oriental Institute archeologists, examining and clearing the ruins of Persepolis palaces of kings Darius and Xerxes and their successors, near Shiraz. The tablets contain close to 20,000 original texts in cuneiform and Elamite language, Aramaic script and language, and seal impressions, and are currently on loan from Iran at the Oriental Institute.

PFA is the largest and most consequential single source of information on the Achaemenid Persian Empire at its zenith. It provides a very important portal into the languages, art, society, administration, history, geography and religion in the heart of the Persian Empire in the time of Darius I, around 500 BC. It has fundamentally transformed every aspect of modern research on Achaemenid history and culture.

The PFA Project at the Oriental Institute is responsible for carefully cleaning these important ancient tablets, taking high resolution digital imagery of the texts on the tablets, exploring various technologies for the best imaging of the tablets such as 3D, laser, and CT scanning), and recording the texts and impressions. An editorial team within the group reviews and prepares editions of the texts, and all of the tablets, texts and impressions are carefully cataloged for publication and archiving. At this point more than 8000 tablets are completed, resulting in almost 40 Terabytes of data, and the team expects to grow the collection to approximately 11,000 over the next two years.

The tablets have been subject to a long legal battle where plaintiffs suing the Iranian government are asking for the ancient tablets as compensation. With the fate of the archive hanging in balance, the PFA Project has been under pressure to clean, scan, and record as many tablets as possible and as fast as possible. The grant from PARSA CF helped the PFA Project during an urgent time, since the project was in critical need for servers and other resources. An appellate court ruling a while later at the end of March came out with favorable result for the PFA, although the battle still continues.

The PFA project has received support from many other organizations besides PARSA CF, including the Andrew Melon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Iran Heritage Foundation is also working closely with the PFA project, and supports and promotes their work.

"After almost eighty years, the Persepolis Fortification Archive is producing a growing stream of new information, deeper understanding, and surprising discoveries. Making sure that this stream continues to flow repays the trust and hope that Iran's loan of the Archive to the Oriental Institute entailed, magnifies the cultural heritage of which these tablets are the humble vessels, and lays that heritage before its cultural heirs and before the civilized world" said Matthew W. Stolper, Director, Persepolis Fortification Archive Project.

by ARASH KARAMI

02 May 2011 23:40

Legal dispute over Persepolis tablets threatens international lending of cultural assets.In 1930, archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld came across 30,000 clay tablets on a dig in the ancient city of Persepolis, near modern-day Shiraz. Now these same Persepolis tablets are embroiled in a legal battle involving the Islamic Republic of Iran, the University of Chicago, and a pedestrian mall bombing in Jerusalem.

After they were unearthed in the 1930s, the inscribed and sealed tablets have been on loan to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago for study, where many still remain. They have become a treasure trove in revealing the inner administrative workings and social structure of ancient Persia during the reign of Darius I around the time of 500 BCE.

Among many facts, they hold the records of the different rations apportioned to women and men, receipt and taxation, redistribution to priests and artisans, means of travel and communication, storage of food and livestock. Not least of all, they have proven to be a valuable asset in the study of ancient languages such as Elamite, which died off with the invasion of Alexander the Great, and Old Persian, a language which the tablets show was surprisingly used more often than expected by everyday Persians. The tablets hold a further value: What is known about this era historically comes from Greek and Arabic sources, and the Aramaic and Hebrew versions of the Old Testament. For the first time, scholars had the day-to-day story of the Persians, by the Persians, and for the world.

In 2002, the Persepolis Fortification Archive at the Oriental Institute began state-of-the-art 3D imaging of the tablets that had not already been returned to the government of Iran. Though the primary purpose of the Fortification Archive is to store digitally the clay tablets for future scholars who happen to find the daily administrative routine of the Persian Empire titillating reading, there was a more immediate motivation for initiating the process.

Only one year before the Oriental Institute began the 3D imaging, five American victims of a 1997 Hamas suicide bombing that occurred on Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda Street sued the government of Iran in a U.S. court for its support of the Palestinian organization...

(Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday backed Iran in a dispute with Americans who demand that Persian antiquities in two Chicago museums be used to pay damages for victims of a 1997 suicide bombing in Israel.

The decision by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals overturns a lower court ruling allowing the U.S. plaintiffs to search for any and all Iranian assets in the United States to pay a $71.5 million judgment against Iran.

The case grew out of a September 1997 triple suicide bombing at a Jerusalem pedestrian mall that killed five people and injured 200. Two members of the Islamist group Hamas were convicted.The lawsuit filed by five groups of Americans who were either seriously wounded or relatives of the injured argued Iran bore responsibility because it provided training and support to Hamas for attacks.Having won their case, the plaintiffs embarked on a search for Iranian assets to pay the judgment. They found three collections of ancient Persian artifacts -- prehistoric pottery, ornaments, and precious tablets with Elamite writing -- owned by or on loan to Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute.

The museums argued the artifacts qualified for immunity under U.S. law and could not be used to pay the judgment. They said seizing the artifacts would set a dangerous precedent for institutions who rely on scholarly interest to trump political and legal disputes.

But the plaintiffs insisted the artifacts were fair game, arguing U.S. legal protections afforded to foreign-owned property do not apply when the property is used for commercial purposes, or when it belongs to an agent linked to a terrorist group.

Iran initially ignored demands that it appear in U.S. courts to assert its sovereign rights. It later hired an American lawyer to represent its interests.

The appeals court did not rule on the fate of the antiquities but it said the lower court wrongly denied Iran its sovereign immunity, which it says is presumed and did not need to be asserted in court by Iran.

The ruling also voided the lower court's order that all Iranian assets in the United States be disclosed, and sent the case back to the lower court for further proceedings "consistent with this opinion."

Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute won a victory on Tuesday in their efforts to maintain possession of thousands of ancient Iranian artifacts. In a ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed a lower court's order that might have handed the artifacts over to several American victims of a 1997 terrorist bombing in Jerusalem.Those victims won a $90-million judgment in 2003 against the government of Iran, which is believed to have financed and trained the terrorists who carried out the Jerusalem bombing. But the victims and their families have struggled to collect any of that judgment from Iran, and their lawyers have sought instead to seize purported Iranian assets in the United States, including antiquities held in American museums. Those legal efforts have been condemned by some scholars as a dangerous politicization of the world's archaeological heritage.

In Tuesday's ruling, a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit ruled that the lower court had misinterpreted the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976, which generally protects the property of foreign governments in the United States. The plaintiffs have asserted that the antiquities in Chicago are exempt from that immunity because of a provision in the 1976 law that excludes property "used for a commercial activity."

The lower court had ruled that the plaintiff's argument on that point must win by default because Iran had not come forward to assert its immunity under the 1976 law. But the Seventh Circuit, like other appellate courts in similar recent cases, ruled that the 1976 law requires courts to decide for themselves which foreign immunities apply to each case, whether or not a foreign government has explicitly demanded those immunities. (Complicating the case, Iran did eventually come forward to assert its immunity.) ...

Their original owners, in what is now Iran, probably saw them as ordinary records of day-to-day transactions, like today's ATM statements or store receipts. More than two millenniums later, however, clay tablets housed at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute have assumed extraordinary significance, as both objects of archaeological study and sources of modern conflict...

... A third grant willunderwrite a comprehensive media and education campaign about the Persepolis artifacts, priceless Persian antiquities currently caught in a legal battle. The case is ongoing and its outcome could set potentially shattering precedents for the art world, museums and cultural institutions worldwide, as well as have a deep, negative impact on the cultural identity of Americans of Iranian descent.

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University will welcome Professor of Assyriology Matthew Stolper on Monday, November 15 at 4 p.m. in Beckman Auditorium of The Ames Library (1 Ames Plaza, Bloomington). His talk, titled “Shattered Window on the Persian Empire: Rescuing the Persepolis Fortification Archive,” is sponsored by the Greek & Roman Studies Department, Eta Sigma Phi and the Classics Club, and is part of the Ides Lecture & Performance Series.

The director of the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, Stolper studies clay tablets discovered in the ancient ruins of Persepolis in the 1930s by a University of Chicago expedition. Stolper is hoping to make the tens of thousands of the Persepolis clay tablets, which recorded the daily rule of Achemenid Persian kings from 550-330 B.C., available online. American survivors of terrorist bombings are asking Federal courts to award them possession of the Persepolis Fortification tablets to satisfy punitive judgments against the Islamic Republic of Iran.“There is only one Persepolis Fortification Archive,” Stolper said. “It’s the richest, densest, most complex source of information on the languages, society, institutions, and art of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Breaking it up or losing it entirely without harvesting all of this information would leave a tragic wound in the history of civilization.”

For additional information about the speaker or the Ides series, contact the Greek and Roman Studies Department at (309) 556-3173.

Washington — The fate of clay tablets that recorded details of everyday government transactions in the Persian Empire 2,500 years ago might depend on maneuverings in the government of the modern United States.The tablets — more than 10,000 of them from a long-buried Persian government archive at Persepolis — are at the center of a lobbying effort in the U.S. Congress. They were discovered in 1933 and have been in the United States since 1936, on loan from Iran for study. Scholars, research institutions and Iranian-American groups are trying to protect them from being seized and auctioned off for the benefit of people who have legal claims against the current Iranian government over acts of terrorism...

In 1933 and 1934, archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld excavated an astonishingly large cache of inscribed tablets at Persepolis, once the monumental capital of the Persian Empire, and now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

On Sept. 4th, 1997, a Hamas-sponsored suicide attack at the Ben Yehuda mall in Jerusalem took the lives of five people, including three young girls.

Thought these two events would be completely disconnected? So did I, and maybe normally they would be. What they have in common is the Islamic Republic of Iran, the country where the tablets were found, and the country that partially funds Hamas. This connection has linked the tablets and the suicide bombing together in an unpredictable lawsuit that threatens the increasingly fragile nature of international archaeological cooperation...

By ignoring lawsuits against it and failing to take an active role in the post-judgment phase of those cases, Iran is at risk of seeing a major component of its cultural heritage broken up and sold in pieces. That was the underlying message of an April 27, 2010 lecture by Matthew W. Stolper at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia about the Persepolis Fortification Tablets...

Washington, DC - The campaign to save the Persepolis Tablets is quietly gaining momentum, as NIAC and some of the nation’s top universities work to protect thousands of priceless cultural artifacts at risk of being seized by lawyers and auctioned off to the highest bidder...

...Soon, NIAC will also deploy the Persepolis Center, an online resource that will not only serve as a clearinghouse for background information about the Persepolis Tablets but will also provide a direct connection between NIAC and members with the latest updates on our efforts, new opportunities for members to mobilize, tools for contacting elected representatives, and profiles of endangered collections.If we are successful in our efforts, the Iranian American community can take pride in protecting not only our own cultural artifacts, but all cultural artifacts from the threat of lawsuit in the U.S.

...The use of the Iranian antiquities to satisfy the Rubin judgment could also put American cultural property at risk and cause foreign policy complications for the United States. The U.S. Government has filed several statements of interest with the court expressing these concerns. On June 6, 2006 Abbas Salimi-Namin, the former head of Iran’s Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organization sent a letter to the United Nations that illustrates the potential for problems. The missive demanded the immediate return of the tablets. While the Oriental Institute had previously enjoyed a good relationship with Iran based on a shared interest in gleaning knowledge from the tablets, the letter accused the museum of keeping the objects “on various grounds and pretexts” and ominously suggested that if the antiquities are turned over to the terror victims, American museums with objects in Iran would “face a similar measure from Tehran.”

...Consider the following real life case on which I am currently working. In 1997, several persons, including some Americans, were injured in a suicide bombing in Israel for which Hamas later took credit. In 2003, the U.S. victims of that bombing, in a lawsuit entitled Rubin v. Iran, sued Iran in a U.S. federal court in Washington, D.C. pursuant to a section of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act in effect at the time. That portion of the law, 28 U.S.C. §1605(a)(7), permitted Americans who suffered injury (or death) to sue those nations designated by the United States as “state sponsors of terrorism” for providing “material support” to commit an act of terrorism. At the time of the lawsuit, the nations designated as state sponsors of terrorism were Iran, Cuba, Syria, Iraq, Libya, North Korea and Sudan. Today, only Iran, Cuba, Syria and Sudan remain on the list. In the Washington, D.C. case, the Rubin plaintiffs won against Iran a multi-million dollar default judgment, which Iran refused to pay. The plaintiffs, still determined to collect their money, thus registered their judgment in jurisdictions in the United States where the plaintiffs believed Iranian assets were located. They asked the courts in those jurisdictions to permit them to “attach” (a legal term meaning essentially judicial seizure) the various alleged Iranian assets, sell them at judicial auction, and use the proceeds of such sales to satisfy their multi-million dollar judgment.

In one such instance, the plaintiffs registered their judgment in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The plaintiffs selected that court because there are three collections of ancient Persian artifacts owned by Iran or alleged to be owned by Iran in Chicago. One of the collections is not a true collection but rather a smattering of artifacts at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History collectively known as the Herzfeld Collection. The artifacts are so named because, according to the plaintiffs, noted archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld surreptitiously took the items from Iran in the early 20th Century and later unlawfully sold the allegedly stolen items to the University of Chicago and the Field Museum. Iran makes no claim to these artifacts and the university and the Field Museum vigorously defend their lawful ownership of the items. The plaintiffs assert that Iran nonetheless owns the Herzfeld items by operation of an Iranian patrimony law which, according to the plaintiffs, provides that any item unearthed in Iran is owned by Iran. Notably, the Rubin plaintiffs also have sued Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts alleging that those museums also have in their possession several items stolen by Herzfeld and hence are Iran owned. Like the museums in Chicago, however, the Boston museums vigorously defend their lawful ownership of the items.

The other two collections involved in the Chicago litigation, the Persepolis Collection and the Chogha Mish Collection, are housed at the Oriental Institute and are, everyone agrees, owned by Iran. These two collections arrived at the Oriental Institute in the 1930s and 1960s, respectively, following archaeological digs. In the 1930s, the Oriental Institute sent a team of its archaeologists – led by Ernst Herzfeld – to Iran, with the Iranian government’s consent, to excavate the ancient Persian city of Persepolis. Persepolis, the capital of the Achaemenid Empire, was built by Darius I in approximately 515 B.C. and destroyed by Alexander the Great in approximately 330 B.C. Though largely destroyed by Alexander, the site was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979 due to monumental ruins which were left standing. Following the excavation, Iran agreed to loan to the Institute for study a grouping of rare tablet and tablet fragments found in the fortifications. Some of the tablets are written in an ancient text known as Elamite, a now extinct language understood today by a handful of people. The tablets contain administrative records of daily Achaemenid society, such as the amounts and recipients of food rations...

... These tablets only make sense if they are studied as a group and not dispersed throughout the world in the hand of dealers and private collectors. It is a rare archive from antiquity, and so it should remain as such to be studied and understood. It would be a shame to have had in the twenty-first century a unique source for understanding the ancient Persians that got arbitrarily partitioned and dispersed, forcing us to remain in the dark for another 2,500 years about the social and cultural history of these people and the region.
As citizens of a society which promotes the understanding and accepting of diversity here and for the world, we must not let this happen. Our people need to be able to go to museums and see these objects to understand the antiquity, beauty, and diversity of the world in which they live in. The auctioning ancient artifacts would be a great mistake. If the current administration allows their sale to private dealers and collectors, the cost, in terms of the destruction of evidence for the study of the history of humanity, as well as with regard to America's reputation, is incalculable.

New technologies and academic collaborations are helping scholars at the University of Chicago analyze hundreds of ancient documents in Aramaic, one of the Middle East’s oldest continuously spoken and written languages.

Members of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California are helping the University’s Oriental Institute make very high-quality electronic images of nearly 700 Aramaic administrative documents. The Aramaic texts were incised in the surfaces of clay tablets with styluses or inked on the tablets with brushes or pens. Some tablets have both incised and inked texts.

Discovered in Iran, these tablets form one of the largest groups of ancient Aramaic records ever found. They are part of the Persepolis Fortification Archive, an immense group of administrative documents written and compiled about 500 B.C. at Persepolis, one of the capitals of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Archaeologists from the Oriental Institute discovered the archive in 1933, and the Iranian government has loaned it to the Oriental Institute since 1936 for preservation, study, analysis and publication.

The Persepolis texts have started to provide scholars with new knowledge about Imperial Aramaic, the dialect used for international communication and record-keeping in many parts of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires, including parts of the administration at the imperial court of Persepolis. These texts have even greater value because they are so closely connected with documents written in other ancient languages by the same administration at Persepolis.

“We don’t have many archives of this size. A lot of what’s in these texts is entirely fresh, but this also changes what we already knew,” said Annalisa Azzoni, an assistant professor at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University. Azzoni is a specialist on ancient Aramaic and is now working with the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project at the Oriental Institute. “There are words I know were used in later dialects, for example, but I didn’t know they were used at this time or this place, Persia in 500 B.C. For an Aramaicist, this is quite an important discovery.”

Clearer images delivered more quickly
Scholars from the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California helped the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project build and install an advanced electronic imaging laboratory at the Oriental Institute. Together, the two projects are making high-quality images of the Aramaic texts and the seal impressions associated with those texts. They are distributing the new images to the international research community through the Internet.

Inked and incised texts pose different problems that call for different imaging solutions. Making high-resolution scans under polarized and filtered light reveals the ink without interference from stains and glare, and sometimes shows faded characters that cannot be seen in ordinary daylight. Using another advanced imaging technique, called Polynomial Texture Mapping, researchers are able to see surface variations under variable lighting, revealing the marks of styluses and even the traces of pens in places where the ink itself has disappeared.

Distributing the results online will give worldwide communities of philologists and epigraphers images that are almost as good as the original objects―and in some cases actually clearer than the originals―to study everything from vocabulary and grammar to the handwriting habits of individual ancient scribes.

Researcher Marilyn Lundberg and her colleagues from the West Semitic Research Project built two Polynomial Texture Mapping devices from scratch at the Oriental Institute. They trained Persepolis Fortification Archive Project workers in using them, and also in using filtered light with a camera equipped with a high-resolution scanning device. Now a stream of raw images is uploaded every day to a dedicated server maintained by Humanities Research Computing at Chicago, then uploaded for post-processing at the University of Southern California. Fully processed imagery is available on InscriptiFact, the online application of the West Semitic Research Project, and in the Online Cultural Heritage Research Environment, the online application of the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project.

Seeing the whole picture
The Polynomial Texture Mapping apparatus looks a bit like a small astronomical observatory, with a cylindrical based topped by a hemispherical dome. The camera takes a set of 32 pictures of each side of the tablet, with each shot lit with a different combination of 32 lights set in the dome. After post-processing, the PTM software application knits these images to allow a viewer sitting at a computer to manipulate the apparent direction, angle and intensity of the light on the object, and to introduce various effects to help with visualization of the surface.

“This means that the scholar isn’t completely dependent on the photographer for what he sees anymore,” said Bruce Zuckerman, Director of the West Semitic Research Project and its online presence, InscriptiFact. “The scholar can pull up an image on the screen and relight an object exactly as he wants to see it. He can look at different parts of the image with different lighting, to cast light and shadow across even the faintest, shallowest marks of a stylus or pen on the surface, and across every detail of a seal impression.”

“This is a wonderful way to look at seal impressions,” said Elspeth Dusinberre, another Persepolis Fortification Project collaborator. Dusinberre, an associate professor of classics at the University of Colorado, is studying the imagery and the use of seals impressed on the Aramaic tablets. “Some of the impressions are faint, or incomplete, on curved surfaces or damaged surfaces. Sometimes Aramaic text is written across them. You need to be able to move the light around to highlight every detail, to see the whole picture.”

The Persepolis Fortification Archive also includes about 10,000 to 12,000 other tablets and fragments with cuneiform texts in Elamite―a few hundred of them with short secondary texts in Aramaic. There are also about 4,000 to 5,000 others with impressions of seals, but no texts, and there are a few unique documents in other languages and scripts, including Greek, Old Persian and Phrygian.

“That’s what makes this group of Aramaic texts so extraordinary,” Stolper said. “From one segment of the Persepolis Fortification Archive, the Elamite texts, we know a lot about conditions around Persepolis at about 500 B.C. When we can add a second stream of information, the Aramaic texts, we’ll be able to see things in a whole new light. They add a new dimension of the ancient reality.”

Impacts are far-reaching
The collaboration between the Oriental Institute at Chicago and the West Semitic Research Project at Southern California began with support from a substantial grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2007. To date, the teams have made high-quality images of almost all the monolingual Aramaic Fortification tablets. The next phase of the work, supported by a second Mellon grant that runs through 2010, will make images of the short Aramaic notes written on cuneiform tablets, seal impressions on uninscribed tablets and previously unrecorded Elamite cuneiform texts.

The tablets have been studied since they came to Chicago in 1936, and many of them have been sent back to Iran. Oriental Institute scholar Richard T. Hallock published about 2,100 of the Elamite texts in 1969, and Margaret Cool Root and Persepolis Fortification Archive Project collaborator Mark Garrison are completing a three-volume publication of the impressions made on those documents by about 1,500 distinct seals.

These publications have had far-reaching results. “They have transformed every aspect of modern study of the languages, history, society, institutions, art and religion of the Achaemenid Persian Empire,” Stolper said. “No serious treatment of the empire that Cyrus and Darius built and that Alexander destroyed can ignore the perspectives of the Fortification Archive.”

“If that is the effect of a sample of one component of the archive,” added Garrison, “imagine what will happen when we can have larger samples and other components, and not just the written record, but the imagery, the impressions made by thousands of different seals that administrators and travelers―the men and women who figure in the texts―employed.”

By 2010, the collaborating teams expect to have high-quality images of 5,000 to 6,000 Persepolis tablets and fragments, and to supplement these with conventional digital images of another 7,000 to 8,000 tablets and fragments. The images will be distributed online as they are processed, along with cataloging and editorial information.

“Thanks to electronic media, we don’t have to cut the parts of the archive up and distribute the pieces among academic specialties,” said Stolper. “We can combine the work of specialists in a way that lets us see the archive as it really was, in its original complexity, as one big thing with many distinct parts.”

While the United States and Iran heatedly battle over nuclear disarmament on the world stage, they joined forces last week before the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals......At oral argument, the 7th Circuit panel seemed to favor the arguments of the United States, Iran and the institutions, questioning the lower court's authority to disregard the artifacts' apparent statutory immunity. The artifacts "enjoy presumptive immunity" under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, said Judge Diane Sykes. "It can hardly be interpreted otherwise -- that's what it says.

Legal action on behalf of victims of terrorism has attempted to force the sale of cultural artifacts on loan to U.S. institutions in order to compensate those victims. Such action jeopardizes the participation of American institutions in international cultural exchanges. The authors maintain that archaeological artifacts should not be sold to satisfy a court judgment, regardless of the actions of a particular regime, and that it should be possible for nations to share their cultural heritage without fear of loss.

USC’s first pilgrims to a temple of high-energy physics will be seeking answers to worldly questions about ancient commerce.

Archaeologist Lynn Swartz Dodd of USC College and her students are taking trade artifacts from Egypt to the Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Photon Source, home of the most powerful X-rays in the country...

The group hopes to return to Argonne this fall or next spring for a second round of studies, this time to analyze Assyrian and Persian artifacts found in Israel, Turkey, Iraq and Iran, which are on loan from the Oriental Institute of Chicago...

This is not the first time that USC has brought modern technology to bear on ancient problems. Dodd’s colleague Bruce Zuckerman leads a team that has been creating digital images of the ancient writings on the Persepolis Tablets at the Oriental Institute in Chicago.

The project has two goals: to preserve at least digital access to the Iranian government-owned tablets, which may be sold off as part of a lawsuit seeking to punish Iran for its ties to the terrorist group Hamas; and to reduce physical study of the tablets by scholars.

“Looking at a text is probably the most damaging thing you can do to it,” Zuckerman said.

Washington, DC - Iranian-Americans from the New York tri-state area exceeded NIAC’s fundraising goals and helped raise over $110,000 to go towards preserving the Persepolis Artifacts on May 30th at the Asia Society in Manhattan...

Special guest, Professor Matthew Stolper who has dedicated his career to studying these tablets, made the gravity of losing just one of these artifacts crystal clear - If there are too many of these tablets being auctioned, their value will drop. So what do people do to ensure that the price remains high? "They destroy a good number of them," he exclaimed to a shocked audience. He also stressed the importance of keeping these items together, in fact, they are really to be seen as one item. Like a dinosaur fossil - if one bone is missing, we lose a sense of what the animal was. The same goes for these artifacts which tell the story of the Persian empire during the time of Darius the Great.

Thanks to our community in the City that Never Sleeps, NIAC is better positioned to ensure that not a single tablet from Persepolis is confiscated, auctioned or destroyed. NIAC is involved through legal, media and policy avenues to preserve the Persepolis tablets

A federal court in Massachusetts affirmed on 31 March that Iranian antiquities at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Harvard University Art Museums might be subject to a claim by the victims of a terrorist bombing allegedly sponsored by Iran...In the latest round of litigation in Massachusetts, the court declined to reconsider its prior ruling that the plaintiffs might be able to claim the antiquities under the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002. The case will now go to the federal appeals court.

On May 16, 2009, a private gathering hosted by members of the Farhang Foundation’s board of trustees, was attended by a number of enthusiasts in history and culture of ancient Iran, to raise funds to support Prof. Stolper’s efforts to preserve the contents the Persepolis Tablets...

In September of 1997, three Hamas suicide bombers blew themselves up in a crowded pedestrian mall in Jerusalem, killing five and wounding nearly 200. Several of the American victims sued the government of Iran, accusing it of being complicit in the attack, and won a $412 million default judgment. In seeking to satisfy that judgment, the plaintiffs have gone to court to seize ancient Persian artifacts being held by the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, the Chicago Field Museum, several Harvard University museums, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts...

In an effort to raise awareness about these cases and to further explore their cultural and scholarly impact, the Chicago Chapter of the Iranian American Bar Association (IABA) will host a panel discussion on Wednesday, June 10 from 5:45 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at the University Center, 525 S. State Street, Lake Room, Chicago. The panelists include Dr. Gil Stein and Dr. Matthew Stolper of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, Dr. Patty Gerstenblith of the DePaul University College of Law, and Sue Benton, lead counsel for the Chicago Field Museum...

Washington DC - As the U.S. District Court decides the fate of thousands of historic Persian artifacts, the U.S. Supreme Court will soon determine whether U.S. citizens can sue the newly formed Republic of Iraq for the misdeeds of the former Saddam Hussein regime. The timing of the case is critical to not only future claims filed against sovereign nations including the United States, but also the outcome of two suits that seek to seize and auction off invaluable artifacts from Persepolis with great historical significance to Iranian Americans.

In the Republic of Iraq v. Beaty, the Supreme Court will soon decide whether the Republic of Iraq is immune from a civil suit brought by several U.S. military and media personnel allegedly captured and mistreated by the former Iraqi regime headed by Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Kuwait invasion. This case consolidates several lawsuits filed by over 236 plaintiffs that seek more than $3 billion in damages against the new government in Iraq for the misgivings of the former Hussein regime...

The Tehran Times reports that Iran's ministry of culture and Islamic guidance rejected a request from the US National Gallery of Art to borrow a painting by Gauguin from the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Speaking to the ministry's decision, office for visual arts director Mahmud Shaluii had heated words: "In response to the National Gallery of Art director, we said that the United States is not legally safe for Iranian artworks."

A curator in a snit hardly ranks among the heavy diplomatic conflicts that mar US–Iran relations. But on this front, Iran is not being churlish. In fact, the curator has it exactly right: Iran would be out of its mind to send a Gaugin – or anything else – to the US, because the US has no intention of returning it. A new judicial ruling on assets and cultural lending threatens to cut off cultural cooperation between the two nations, just as its leaders are taking tentative steps toward finding some middle ground...

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMCA) recently turned down a request from the National Gallery of Art in Washington for a loan of a Paul Gauguin still life for an exhibition ... it is not possible to loan the painting due to the lack of confidence that the United States will safeguard Iranian artworks,” noted Shaluii, who is also the curator of TMCA.

McLean, Va - The Iranian-American community came together to celebrate the coming of Norooz and support NIAC's continued efforts to protect the Persepolis tablets and support diplomacy, on March 7, 2009 in Mclean VA. The event, which hosted more than 150 members of the Iranian-American community, raised an impressive $50,000. Dr. Paymaun Lotfi and Mrs. Bita Lotfi hosted the event and opened their home in Virginia to the local Iranian-American community...

NIAC's special guest was Professor Matthew Stolper of Chicago University, the caretaker of the prized Persian artifacts in the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project. He spoke extensively on the vast significance of the Persepolis artifacts to ancient Persian history and to the international community.

He expressed great concern for the risk of the artifacts being confiscated and auctioned off, arguing that the window the tablets provide into Iran's ancient history only exists if all of the tablets are kept. They are like bones in a skeleton - with a single tablet missing, the entire skeleton collapses...

Washington, DC - Today, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) -- the largest Iranian-American grassroots organization -- presented a brief Amicus Curiae to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District Illinois Eastern Division in a lawsuit that seeks to seize and auction off thousands of historic Persian artifacts of substantial historical importance currently on display at the University of Chicago.

"NIAC believes these artifacts qualify as cultural property and are part of the cultural heritage of all persons of Iranian descent," said Trita Parsi, President of NIAC. "Our role is to ensure that they are not confiscated and auctioned off to the highest bidder - an act that would not only contradict the principles embodied in numerous laws and treaties, but set a terrible precedent in America and for several similar cases as well as potentially result in retaliation against U.S. properties worldwide."

In presenting its brief, NIAC seeks to act as an amicus curiae or "friend of the Court," and will ask the Court to consider the cultural importance of these artifacts when interpreting the provisions of law that will govern its ruling.

Since 2004, the Oriental Institute has found itself at the unlikely nexus of archaeology, law, and terrorism. At stake are millions of dollars, a collection of 2,500-year-old tablets, and possibly the future of archaeological research.

With its stone fireplace and wood paneling, it would be less surprising to see Indiana Jones walk into Gil Stein’s office at the Oriental Institute than the visitor who stopped by five years ago.

“Are you Gil Stein?” the man asked, standing in the doorway to Stein’s office. Stein answered in the affirmative.

“You’ve been served,” the man said, handing over an envelope. And with that, he turned and left.

The envelope revealed a summons from the federal district court of the Northern District of Illinois, demanding that Stein, the Institute’s director, turn over ancient tablets from the Institute’s Persepolis Fortification Archive and Choga Mish collection. They would be sold, according to the summons, in order to compensate victims of a 1997 terrorist attack funded by Iran.

On March 4th, 1933, a group of American archaeologists from the Chicago University's Oriental Institute, excavating in the ruins of Pârsâ (Persepolis), struck pure gold. They found the largest ancient archive of its size under heaps of ashes and broken stones that had collapsed, preserving its treasure for centuries. That priceless treasure, Achaemenid Administrative Archives, more commonly known as the Persepolis Fortification Archive (PFA), is now caught in the American legal system, as the coveted prize in a federal lawsuit - part of a series of related lawsuits, no longer just to seize commercial assets owned by the Islamic Republic of Iran, but a fight for the seizure of precious Persian antiquities held by western museums, regardless of who owns them...

...Under the law, President Obama has the power to issue an executive waiver to stop the seizure of foreign assets if that would further US national security. Considering the importance of the President's efforts to reduce tensions with Iran and solicit its collaboration in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the dire consequences of failure, President Obama should do exactly that. It's not the easiest decision politically, but no one ever said overcoming 30 years of enmity would be easy.

The victims of two different terrorist attacks have filed two separate lawsuits, both of them competing for the right to auction the Persepolis Fortification Archive.

Chicago Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle are two of several news sources that have picked up the story: the Persepolis Fortification Archive, on loan from Iran and under the care of the Oriental Institute since the 1930s, might be seized to help pay for damages awarded to over 800 victims of terrorist attacks. The archive consists of thousands of inscribed clay tablets, all of them 2500 years old, that taken together are scholars’ best aid in understanding the everyday workings of the Persian empire.

My friends tease me that I wrote some 700+ pages of romance just to put the Persepolis Fortification Archive in the context of time and place and show the horror that the Persians must have felt at the time watching Persepolis [Parsa] burn by the hands of the bloody invading Macedonians. A grief that still burns the tips of my fingers.

The third chapter of my book: “Axis of Empire” passing through the ruins of Persepolis is available in PDF format, and here is a link.

CHICAGO — The professor opens a cardboard box and gingerly picks up a few hunks of dried clay — dust-baked relics that offer a glimpse into the long-lost world of the Persian empire that spanned a continent 2,500 years ago.

Matt Stolper has spent decades studying these palm-sized bits of ancient history. Tens of thousands of them. They’re like a jigsaw puzzle. A single piece offers a tantalizing clue. Together, the big picture is scholarly bliss: a window into Persepolis, the capital of the Persian empire looted and burned by Alexander the Great.

The collection — on loan for decades to the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute — is known as the Persepolis Fortification Archive. These are, to put it simply, bureaucratic records. But in their own way, they tell a story of rank and privilege, of deserters and generals, of life in what was once the largest empire on earth.

For Stolper — temporary caretaker of the tablets — these are priceless treasures.
For others, they may one day be payment for a terrible deed...

International archeologists have asked US President Barack Obama to help return the Elamite tablets of Persepolis to their home in Iran.

Over 600 archeologists have signed a letter to President Obama asking him to stop the ancient artifacts, which are have been loaned to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, from being confiscated and sold...

In March 1933, an archaeological expedition from the Oriental Institute, a division of the University of Chicago, was working in southwestern Iran among the ruins of Persepolis, the onetime capital of the ancient Persian Empire. While building a road for trucks to bring in drinking water, laborers accidentally uncovered a huge archive of 2,500-year-old clay tablets, inscribed with wedge-shaped cuneiform characters, that had been stored inside a fortification wall.

Five decades later, in October 1983, a terrorist drove a Mercedes truck loaded with explosives into the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut and killed 241 American servicemen. Fourteen years after that, in September 1997, terrorists set off suitcase bombs at Ben Yehuda, a popular pedestrian shopping mall in Jerusalem, killing five people and wounding nearly 200. Claiming that Iran underwrote both bombings, the U.S. survivors and family members of those who were killed sued that country in separate federal lawsuits in Washington, D.C., in 2001. Iran did not make an appearance, and the plaintiffs won a total of more than $3 billion in default judgments.

The tablets, basically an administrative record, chronicle the distribution of food within Persepolis and the surrounding region.

Now these disparate elements are coming together in a Chicago courtroom. The plaintiffs in the bombing cases say that the only way they can collect what is owed to them is to force the sale of the Persepolis tablets, currently at the University of Chicago on loan from Iran, and they have filed lawsuits demanding that the archive go on the auction block.

The exhibit, which opened a week ago today, runs through March 15, 2009, and is reviewed here by The New York Times, is the direct sequel to the Met's 2003 Art of the First Cities, which covered the third millennium B.C. But unlike the 2003 show, which took place as American troops invaded the heartland of ancient Mesopotamia, there is a gaping hole in the new show: 55 pieces from Syria — stone sculptures; frescoes; goldwork, including this stupendous bowl from the ancient city of Ugarit (left) – were not sent as promised to New York.

In a wall card near the beginning of the show, the Met thanks the Syrian government for its willingness to lend such important objects, and expresses "deep regret that recent legislation in the United States has made it too difficult and risky for the planned loans to proceed." That legislation, an amendment made in January to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, permits private individuals claiming to be victims of state-sponsored terrorism to file liens against property belonging to that state whenever the property is in the United States. Property loaned to museums may fall within the ambit of this amendment.

This is the almost inevitable sequel to the legal battle over the Persepolis tablets...

Persian Artifacts Case: An Insider’s Perspective, By Babback Sabahi in The Iranian American Bar Association ("IABA") Review, volume 3, Fall 2008.
[Babback Sabahi, who is an associate at Mayer Brown, LLP in Washington, D.C, reviews the status of the case and reports that "Mayer Brown, LLP will file an amicus brief in this case on behalf of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) encouraging the court to uphold the exempt status of the Iranian artifacts under the FSIA. Such ruling would be consistent with contemporary trends in the protection of cultural property as demonstrated by U.S. federal and state laws, and international treaties.]

Iran seeking more docs for case of Achaemenid tablets, TEHRAN, Sept. 23, 2008 (Mehr News Agency)
["Iran’s Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Organization (CHTHO) is searching for more documents to enable the country to win the court case against the University of Chicago on the matter of the Achaemenid tablets. CHTHO’s Judicial Office has set up a team of experts to look for the documents at the archives of Iran’s Customs Office, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and former prime ministerial office -- present Presidential Office, the office director Omid Ghanami told CHN on Monday..."]

Should Iran Treasure Be Held for Ransom?, By Chris Sloan in Stones, Bones ‘n Things (a National Geographic Society blog),Posted Aug 18,2008
["...The tension surrounding these tablets reminds me of the current tension between the nations of Iran and the U.S.. There is a lot of old baggage, politics, pain and loss, and blustering. Cultural heritage should not be used as a weapon against nations. It is world heritage we're talking about..."]

Earth still ‘best trustee’ for Achaemenid palace, TEHRAN, Aug. 13 (MNA)
[On the backfilling of the site in Sorvan near Nurabad Mamasani in Fars Province, believed by the excavators to be the location of the place "Liduma" mentioned in the Persepolis Fortification Archive.]

Hague Tribunal Figures in Terror Case Involving Iran, Chicago Museum, By JOSH GERSTEIN, Staff Reporter of the Sun, July 17, 2008
["...On Monday, Iran's representative wrote to the tribunal's clerks asking for various documents filed in connection with the American-Iranian dispute. "The documents are to be produced to the plaintiffs in a litigation pending before a domestic court," M.H. Zahedin-Labbaf wrote, a court filing in Chicago shows.

Clerks for the tribunal, whose cases often drag on for years, wrote back the same day that they would not provide the documents. "We respectfully inform you that we are unable to comply," the international court's co-registrars, Jessica Hilburn-Holmes and Ali Marossi, wrote, citing tribunal rules which keep such records confidential....]

Terror Case Judge: Iran Must Identify U.S. Assets, By JOSH GERSTEIN, Staff Reporter of the Sun, June 30, 2008
["In an apparently unprecedented move, a federal judge in Chicago is ordering the government of Iran to comply with the requests of terrorism victims that the Islamic nation identify of all of its real estate holdings, financial assets, and other property in America. In issuing the order last week, Judge Blanche Manning effectively rejected the advice of the Bush administration that the court should put limits on what Iran is required to disclose about its American assets...]

'They can give us justice': Families of Marines killed in Lebanon join suit seeking Iran funds, May 30, 2008, By Dave Newbart, Sun-Times News Group.
["... While the Marine families wanted to proceed with their own case against Iran, Manning this week consolidated their claim with the one already pending. David Strachman, attorney for the mall victims' families, said that decision amounts to "terrorism victims attacking other victims. ... It's unseemly for lawyers for one grUS terrorism claimants compete for Iranian assets, By Andrew Stern. Reuters Thu May 29, 2008 6:27pm EDT.
[".. Families of those killed in the Beirut Marine barracks bombing 25 years ago staked their claim on Thursday to ancient Persian clay tablets, on loan to a U.S. museum, to satisfy a $2.7 billion judgment won against Iran..."]

Judge Gives Terror Victims a Victory Over Iran: Rules in Case Involving Artifacts Held by Chicago Museums, By JOSH GERSTEIN, Staff Reporter of the New York Sun, May 28, 2008.
["In a ruling released yesterday, Judge Blanche Manning ordered the Iranian government to produce its records about how tens of thousands of ancient tablets and other antiquities ended up in the university's collections. In a five-page decision, Judge Manning rejected each of Iran's arguments against allowing discovery in the case. The Islamic Republic's claims that such procedures would lead to similar actions against America and other countries were "overblown," she found"]

Rubin v. The Islamic Republic of Iran - A Struggle for Control of Persian Antiquities in America, James A. Wawrzyniak, Harvard Law School, 2007
["This paper analyzes the multi-jurisdictional attachment and execution proceedings taking place sub nomine Rubin v. The Islamic Republic of Iran. The Rubin litigation raises novel issues in the areas of art law and foreign relations. The first section of the paper evaluates whether third parties have standing to raise a sovereign state’s immunity under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (“FSIA”). The second delves into the particulars of the commercial use exception to the FSIA. The final section considers various provisions of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2001, a new law with little judicial gloss. These three main issues are evaluated within a broader art law framework as historic and valuable Persian antiquities stand at the center of the execution proceedings."]

The Persepolis Tablets: Terror Victims Target Ancient Persian Artifacts, By Alicia M. Hilton. American Bar Association Litigation Update - Hot Topics, April 2007
[n.b.: This is not a new article but it was not seen by me until today, Jan. 16, 2008. Alicia M. Hilton is a Visiting Professor of Law at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago where she teaches Cultural Property and Museum Law, Criminal Procedure, and Undercover Operations and Informant Management Law. Prior to practicing law, she was an FBI Special Agent and an art dealer]

Justice Dept. 'Helps Iran' in Court Case, by Josh Gerstein, Staff Reporter of the New York Sun, November 23, 2007
["...'This court should exercise circumspection in light of the potential foreign policy implications of requiring broad discovery of a foreign sovereign,' a Justice Department lawyer, Rupa Bhattacharyya, wrote in a "Statement of Interest" filed in federal court in Chicago last week. The attorney urged the court to limit the terrorism victims' ability to gather information about the antiquities because Iran is entitled to be treated with "grace and comity" in American legal proceedings..."]

Roads of time converge in Bolaghi Valley Tehran: 19:36 , 2007/09/10, MehrNews.com
["...The director of the Parsa-Pasargadae Research Center noted that the University of Chicago has 30,000 ancient Iranian tablets or fragments of tablets bearing cuneiform inscriptions in its possession and has translated 3000 of them, but added that they are gradually being returned to Iran...]

Everyday text shows that Old Persian was probably more commonly used than previously thoughtUniversity of Chicago Press Release, June 15, 2007
["For the first time, a text has been found in Old Persian language that shows the written language in use for practical recording and not only for royal display. The text is inscribed on a damaged clay tablet from the Persepolis Fortification Archive, now at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. The tablet is an administrative record of the payout of at least 600 quarts of an as-yet unidentified commodity at five villages near Persepolis in about 500 B.C."]

See also the blog enty PFT at the AOS. The initial publication of the tablet will appear presently in ARTA at Achemenet]

Confiscation of Iranian tablets to end Press TV, Posted: Wed, 23 May 2007 08:53:13
[An Iranian official has said the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago has assured Iran the confiscation of its tablets will end]

Iran restates rights over ancient tablets Press TV, Posted: Wed, 02 May 2007 17:19:02
[The Judicial Office of Iran's CHTHO has demanded the extradition of Achaemenid tablets, a possession of Iran according to Iran and US law]

Insulting The Magnificent Persians Hamed Vahdati Nasab , Posted: Mar 28, 2007
[One of a large number of stories criticizing the film 300, and citing Persepolis tablets as evidence]